After much tinkering and coding, Aqueducts of Solomon is now playable!

Aqueducts of Solomon is a solitaire strategy score-chaser, where you take the role of an ancient leader in the middle east trying to build your empire in an arid environment.  It is said that King Solomon pioneered the use of aqueducts, turning the desert into a fertile cornucopia, and you follow in his footsteps in this game.

The game borrows from tabletop gaming to create a fun, strategic exercise.  You draw cards that give you options for what to build onto a hex map that represents mountains on the left and lowlands on the right.  The hexes that you build give you different powers, and eventually, you will build up an empire to pull down the most victory points.

I’m really happy with the game, because I feel that the mechanics mirror the theme and strategy really well.  We’ve all played these worker-placement, empire builders before, but I feel that this one really does a good job of modeling why the aqueducts (and to a lesser extent, travel and commerce routes) played such an important role in the ancient world.   I’m quite pleased (and a bit surprised) how simple I was able to keep the mechanics while still evoking what I hoped to.

Here’s an animated GIF showing it in action:

You can play it on itch.io, play it here on ludumdare.com, or play it on our site with nicely-formatted instructions: Aqueducts of Solomon.